Le pacte des loups (Brotherhood of the Wolf) (2001) [REVIEW]

Not to flex nuts or anything about how cool I am, but I saw this movie in theaters. Yup, that’s right, that’s me bragging about a movie I saw in theaters. In retrospect, that’s really not a big deal. However, ten years ago in western Massachusetts, having to track down a French movie to see it in theaters was kind of a big deal. In addition to seeing this movie in theaters, I remember renting it on VHS to watch it again! Can you believe it?! If I’ve seen this movie twice, why am I reviewing it now? Because in retrospect, I HAVEN’T SEEN THE WHOLE THING. This movie is two and a half hours long, and I fell asleep both times I tried watching it. I remembered the beginning and remembered the end, but whatever happened in the middle was completely unknown to me. But now! I know what happened! In the middle! After ten long years! FINALLLLLLLY!!!!!

SIQQ TRIBALS, BR–wait, this guy actually belongs to a tribe. I take back my tattoo mockery.

Some old dude is telling this story when he’s getting close to dying or something, but we don’t know who that old guy was. Apparently there is some “beast”, who we’ll call a “wolf”, stalking this one small town in France. NOBODY CAN KILL IT! Two dudes show up in town, the King of France’s royal taxidermist/naturalist, and his buddy, a Native American. Apparently in France in the late 1700’s, a Native American was super fucked up and crazy to have just hanging out. This naturalist does some investigating and is basically saying, “Sorry guys, this thing is not a wolf because wolves are awesome and this beast is being a real dickhead.” Unfortunately, this only adds fuel to the fire because this town is pretty religious and they say that if it’s not a wolf, then it’s a beast sent from God to call everyone on their bullshit. While there, the naturalist is trying to bone this girl who has a creepy brother, but also has time to bone Monica Bellucci, who plays a prostitute. Uhhhh, to cut to the chase, the beast was some crazy unnamed animal from Africa that the creepy brother had brought back and trained to kill anyone he wanted after he covered it in super badass animal warrior armor because he wanted to fuck his sister. I hope you guys don’t mind me cutting out the boring parts, because I wish someone had done that for me.

I guess the computer effects were a little dated, but they didn’t really show the “wolf” often enough to be that annoyed.

I’m sure that after reading that summary, you guys probably thought I hated this movie. WRONG. The shit I left out was just about the main dude who looked like Christopher Lambert trying to decide who he wants to pursue, Monica Bellucci or whatever royal lady. One problem? HE DREW PICTURES FOR BOTH OF THEM. And one got all sad. I don’t know, there was a whole hour of boringness in this movie, and were that hour to be removed, you’d have an AWESOME hour and a half movie. Everything looked really cool, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the director, Christophe Gans, went on to direct the Silent Hill movie. There was a conspiracy and religious cults being dickheads and someone calling them out on it, and wolves. I guess those wolves were getting killed, so maybe that wasn’t good, but it had “wolf” in the title, which gets at least 2 stars in my book. I guess I understand why the director had all that relationship shit going on, and it was kind of cool because it was based on “true events”. In the “true” event, the beast was killed and it was just a big wolf, but the movie explained that it was a big hoax, with the taxidermist being involved. It’s still a pretty good movie, but I would have liked it a little more had it been more concise.